


Sundays in June

by Lapsed_Scholar



Series: Family Stories [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Family Fluff, Father's Day, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-24 18:25:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14959791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lapsed_Scholar/pseuds/Lapsed_Scholar
Summary: Sundays in June of the year 2000 aren’t, by and large, as idyllic as one might have expected.





	Sundays in June

Sundays in June of the year 2000 aren’t, by and large, as idyllic as one might have expected.

They’re both happy (of course they are) and cautiously optimistic, but the pregnancy hit Scully hard from the beginning, and it hasn’t let up. She spends a lot of time trying to tough out her nausea and her exhaustion, but keeping a brave façade at work takes all of her energy (and he’s distracted by constantly worrying about her). She’s utterly drained by the weekend. She still tries because she’s Scully (of course she does), but sometimes it’s all too much, and she doesn’t have the energy to do anything but lie in bed and occasionally throw up.

He’s worried (of course he is), but he tries to mask it. “I’ll call your mom,” he tells her softly, once it becomes clear that she won’t be making it to church this morning. He’s been stroking her hair gently, trying to distract her from what, judging from her body language (curled into a wretched ball under a mound of blankets), surely must be a miserable experience.

He deliberately chooses not to think too hard about what Maggie Scully must be able to intuit from the fact that it is Mulder calling her on a Sunday morning at 7:00 to tell her that her daughter isn’t feeling well this morning and won’t be able to come to Mass. He’s unsure how much longer he can make calls like this before the actual reason for the malaise occurs to a woman who had four children. Hopefully there's still a little more time.

“What’s wrong with her, Fox?” The worry bleeds through in the tone. Maybe a hint of resignation.

“I, um, nothing serious, I promise. She’s just feeling under the weather this morning. It, uh. Maybe it was dinner last night. We went out to a new place, and Em and I are fine, but maybe they didn’t wash the salad greens enough.” He is not as skilled at making up wild stories on the fly as most people judge him to be.

In point of fact, during those Sundays in June, they’re still about three months away from telling family, and four months from telling work. Emily is squealingly joyful, but no one over the age of six is surprised, either family or work, and they probably aren’t as good at pretending to be appropriately platonic as they used to be. (It’s entirely possible they were never all that good.)

_Agent Mullins is the exception, but he’s been hitting assiduously and obnoxiously on Scully for the last three years. And when the rumor mill finally reaches him, he skulks down to the basement to look appraisingly at Mulder, who is sitting behind the desk in the middle of an artful spiel on a casefile, and says, with a sour tone and absolutely no preamble, “I thought you were gay.” And then stalks away with no further comment whatsoever._

_Mulder’s mouth hangs open, mid-expostulation. John Doggett, standing on the other side of the desk with a disbelieving and exasperated expression, turns to stare after the departing Mullins for a moment. Then he turns back around as if the interruption had never happened and says to Mulder, “So you’re tryin’ to tell me that these murders are the work of some kinda_ Batman _.”_

_Mulder shakes his head to refocus its contents. “No. That would be ridiculous. It’s a man-bat.”_

After he hangs up with Maggie (accompanying assurances that he’ll be in touch if anything more serious happens, and that is absolutely a lie because if anything more serious happens, it will be up to Scully who knows what), he thinks that he should probably get up, check on Emily, and see about making breakfast.

He has just had time to think this before an almighty crash resounds through the apartment. Scully woozily raises her head from the pillow, and he can see the alarmed look in her eyes, but he forestalls her with a hand to her shoulder and a pretty decent facsimile of an unconcerned, soothing tone. “Shh, it’s OK. I’ll check on it; it’s probably just Em getting into something. Just relax.”

Still, he hurries out of the bedroom to investigate. And stops stock-still in the doorway to the kitchen for the briefest of moments.

The tableau seems to unfold in slow motion. Emily is standing before the stove (which she knows better than to use) teetering on top of a kitchen chair, which has given her the height to reach the stovetop. The burners are on, a heavy cast-iron pan that he doesn’t even recognize and didn’t realize Scully owned has fallen from the cabinet above the stove onto a carton of eggs, which may or may not have crushed into the burners, and which may or may not have turned into flaming projectiles.

He moves faster than he ever imagined he could, grabs her off the chair before she can fall off. “ _Jesus Christ_ , Emily!” His voice is sharp, and he’s definitely not among the Mass-goers on Sunday mornings, but his nerves are fairly shot, and he defies anyone else to do better when presented with that scene.

She’s crying now, piteously, and he’d feel far worse about that if he weren’t so frayed himself. “What the _hell_ were you thinking?” he mutters, as he sets her down and crouches down to examine her arms and legs for burns. Finding none, he stands up long enough to turn and wrench the stove off, before kneeling before her again.

“Are you hurt?” he manages, a little more gently now that the adrenaline spike has somewhat worn off. She shakes her head, still crying.

“My _god_ , Emily. What on earth inspired you to do something so foolish? You _know_ better than to touch the stove, and this is _exactly_ why.” Funny how religious he’s suddenly become. He’s slumped down to sit on the floor with his back against the cabinets, probably looking about as drained as he feels. From this angle he’s actually looking up at her, where she still stands nearby, rubbing at her eye and trying to calm down enough to speak.

He manages to make her explanation out between all the tears. “I’m s-s-sorry! I-I-I was t-trying to... well... a-at camp they told me... it’s Father’s Day today, and s-some of the o-other kids were... but Mommy was s-sick last night, and I c-couldn’t ask her, and...”

Time freezes again (it’s not always a universal invariant) as several things occur to Mulder at once.

  1. It is, in fact, the third Sunday in June. He rarely forgets holidays, just as he rarely forgets anything, but their significance is generally muted in his mind. Just an irrelevant, mildly interesting fact as he goes about his day.
  2. The last Father’s Day he ever attempted to recognize was in 1974. He had never tried again.
  3. Emily has no idea that Scully’s pregnant, and she’s too young to recognize the signs or even be suspicious.



He’s fairly sure they’re both crying now. “Oh, Emily,” he mutters, his voice far softer. He reaches across to where she’s standing folded in on herself and looking miserable and pulls her into a hug.

She stumbles over and sits on his lap, wipes her nose and eyes on the shoulder of his t-shirt. Still sounding miserable, she mumbles, “Are you crying, Mulder? I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to make you cry. I wanted to make you happy.”

He chuckles a little, wetly. “You make me very happy, Em. And I hope you never do that again, but I’m not crying because I’m sad. People can cry for a lot of different reasons. I’m crying right now because I love both you and your mom. But don’t tell your Uncle Bill that I cry, OK?” _(This exhortation is partially in jest, but it’s partially serious, and it’s something of a shame because this Bill would have understood. Fatherhood will remain one of the few common points of understanding between Bill Scully, Jr. and Fox Mulder.)_

“OK,” Emily mutters seriously, burrowing her face deeper into his shoulder.

“And Em? Just draw me a card or something next time, OK?” A nod and a sniffle. _(She will, in fact, draw cards from here on out. And she will never stop. Even after she has her own children, he’ll still get a hand-drawn card in the mail.)_

This is the tableau that greets Maggie Scully when she comes to pick up Emily for church: Fox Mulder is sitting on the floor of the kitchen, back against the cabinets and head tipped back with his eyes closed. Possibly asleep. Emily is curled up in his lap with her face buried in his shoulder, also asleep. Both are in their pajamas, and both look like they’ve been crying. There is a cast iron pan on the middle of the stovetop, on top of a crushed carton of eggs, and a chair is tipped over, lying on its side on the floor. Dana is apparently still in her bedroom.

No one does end up making it to church that day, though Maggie is kind enough to clean up the kitchen without asking how it came to look this way.

Next June, Scully will help Emily with breakfast while Mulder watches William. He will drive the three of them to church to meet Maggie and then spend a reflective morning in a park nearby, staring at nothing in particular and feeling quietly, peacefully thankful to a God he’s not sure he believes in that he has the family he’d never permitted himself to hope for.

**Author's Note:**

> I usually have William born in May, but there's a lot of wiggle room in the canonical timeline (#Dana Scully's year-long pregnancy), and I don't think I ever specified his birth date in this particular AU. So you can assume here that he's born in February or March of 2001.
> 
> Mulder and Scully seem to have a lot of family-related kitchen mishaps in my stories, don't they? Sorry guys.


End file.
